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The island lies to starboard in the grey light of dawn — a streak of pale sand and a dense wall of lontar palms. I watch from the ferry as a concrete jetty materializes from the shoreline, marking the location of Seba, chief town of the tiny island of Sabu, one of the most isolated of all Indonesia’s scattered landfalls.

Two hundred and forty years ago another vessel approached this same shore, an English sailing ship under the command of the celebrated Captain Cook, returning from his first successful exploration of the Pacific. Cook had stumbled upon Sabu, a dot in the ocean halfway between Timor and Sumba, by chance, for at that time he noted, it was “so little known that I never saw a map or chart in which it is clearly or accurately laid down.” The island was, he wrote, “a most pleasing prospect from the sea.” After 15 hours on a ferry, it still is.

The arrival of the ferry from Kupang, West Timor, marks the busiest day of the week in Seba. But by the time I have settled down in one of the little township’s simple home-stays a damp, tropical torpor has returned. Electricity is only available here during the hours of darkness, and even motorbikes are few and far between.

There is, however, a certain buzz around Seba these days. For years Sabu, with a population of around 60,000, was an appendage of the Kupang regency, administered from the East Nusa Tenggara capital 250 kilometers to the east. But last year it became a regency in its own right.

Sitting drinking coffee outside his house on Seba’s muddy main street as a light rain falls, Arman al Gadri tells me that the reaching regency status has been welcomed in Sabu, raising hopes of increased development. The biggest problem that the island faces, he says, is transport. One or two ferries a week come from Kupang, but it’s an exposed crossing, and in the wet season the island can be cut off for weeks. Air links are even more tenuous: the tiny Merpati plane that serves Sabu sometimes only makes it to the island a couple of times a month.

There were no ferries at all when Cook arrived in 1770, but treaties had already been signed between the Dutch and the rulers of Sabu’s five principalities, and Seba was home to an official resident, Johan Lange. He was the archetypal corrupt colonialist, and he issued threats until Cook and his men paid the locals in cash for their supplies — cash that the captain was sure was destined for Lange’s own coffers.

The Dutch had become involved with Sabu in the previous century. In 1674 nervous islanders had massacred the crew of a Dutch vessel, and in seeking revenge colonial forces formed an alliance with the king of Seba and set out on punitive raids of the neighboring principalities.

The next day I visit the spot where Sabunese fortifications turned back those early Dutch attackers. Some 20 km east of Seba, the hilltop village of Hurati is abandoned now, but the sturdy surrounding wall that the Dutch failed to penetrate still stands.

The following day I head for the hills on a borrowed motorbike. In the hilltop kampung of Namata, south of Seba, the native ancestor-worshipping Jingi Tiu religion still lingers. A woman named Hi’a tells me that during Jingi Tiu ceremonies people from around the island, dressed in traditional ikat cloth, descend on Namata.

The houses have long thatched roofs. According to legend the first settlers came originally from India. When they came ashore they turned their boats upside down for shelter, and traditional Sabu houses are reminiscent of these makeshift dwellings.

From Namata I follow a rough road south into rolling hills grazed by sheep and horses. Sabu is a dry island where maize is the staple crop and drought is a real risk.

Over the next two days I travel the back roads of Sabu, finding warm welcomes and fine white beaches where seawater is left in upturned clamshells to evaporate and make salt. Bumpy tracks lead to hilltops offering swelling views to rocky shores, to the off-lying hulk of Raijua Island, and to the empty horizon beyond.

Cook noted that the people of Sabu were addicted to betel nut — and they still are; smiles here have an extra dash of red color. The other lifeblood of Sabu is the lontar palm, which provides sweet sap for making sugar and palm wine, described by him as “a very sweet agreeable Cooling liquor.” On other islands, people hack steps into the trunks to get at the harvest, but in Sabu there is such respect for this “tree of life” that locals wish no injury upon it and bind smooth pebbles to the trunk with twists of dried leaf for footholds instead.

Cook sailed from Sabu on Sept. 21, 1770. As the island fell behind, the captain called his men together and swore them to secrecy about the place they had just visited for fear of arousing Dutch jealously in Batavia. As I make my own departure on the returning Kupang-bound ferry, watching the white beaches and lontar-clad hills fade to a dot on the empty horizon, it seems like the secret is still well-kept.